What Does AWS Direct Connect Have to do With ObjectRocket?

By: Steve Croce

Posted on: November 10, 2016

From day one at ObjectRocket, our mission has been to provide databases close to your application, no matter where it lives. Moving data is never fun, so we're always looking for ways to keep the service snappy regardless of which cloud our users use for their app tier, whether it's Rackspace, AWS, or any other cloud. However, another part of our mission is to provide high performance with our dedicated hardware architecture. That's where we hit a particular challenge... How do we keep our databases close to customers with applications in AWS, while being able to manage and maintain our own gear? The answer is AWS Direct Connect.

What is Direct Connect?

If you're not familiar with AWS Direct Connect, it's an offering by AWS that allows private connectivity between an AWS data center and another data center, colo, etc. This allows you to connect your on-prem resources to Amazon with a low latency and high bandwidth dedicated link.

At ObjectRocket, AWS Direct Connect allows us to provide dedicated connections between our data centers and AWS. When you connect to ObjectRocket from AWS in an AWS Direct Connect enabled datacenter, your traffic will automatically go through the dedicated, high bandwidth pipe rather than having to traverse the public internet.

The table below shows the data centers where AWS Direct Connect is available. You can also hit up our FAQ for more details about our full list of data centers.

Datacenter

Mongo Support

Elasticsearch Support

Redis Support

AWS Direct Connect

Rackspace - U.S. Virginia (IAD)

✔

✔

✔

US-east-1

Rackspace - London (LON)

✔

✔

✔

EU-west-1

Rackspace - Sydney (SYD)

✔

AP-southeast-1

ObjectRocket - U.S. West

✔

US-west-1

AWS - US-east-1

✔

Rackspace IAD

So how can you use it?

We offer two types of Direct Connect to our customers: Shared links and Private links.

Shared Direct Connect

The first and easiest way to connect to ObjectRocket databases via AWS Direct Connect is our shared links. We have multiple 10Gb AWS Direct Connect links that are shared between our customers and used for all traffic traversing from our datacenter to the connected AWS datacenter. This process is automatic, doesn't cost anything on the ObjectRocket side, and doesn't require you to change anything. If you've got an ObjectRocket instance today, you can take advantage of it immediately by simply connecting to your ObjectRocket database from AWS.

I'll follow up in an upcoming post with some more data, but basic testing of AWS Direct Connect from an EC2 server to ObjectRocket has shown sub-millisecond differences in latency when compared to connecting from within the same data center, but your mileage may vary and will depend on your workload.

Though we don't charge for this feature, keep in mind that standard AWS network ingress/egress rates still apply.

Private Direct Connect

If you need more guaranteed bandwidth, we are also able to connect your ObjectRocket databases to private AWS Direct Connect links. Unlike our shared links, these are dedicated links and are only used by your ObjectRocket databases and can be connected directly into your AWS VPC. The private option also comes with additional perks, because it is dedicated to your environment, like guaranteed bandwidth and discounted ingress/egress rates from AWS.

Every private AWS Direct Connect setup is a custom configuration depending on your AWS and ObjectRocket environments, so if you're interested in more information on options, purchasing and how we can set them up, please get in touch with ObjectRocket sales or support.

That's Cool. What's Next?

As I mentioned above, this is just one way that we can get our databases closer to your application. The shared Direct Connect option is just a little perk to make connecting to ObjectRocket from AWS faster and more reliable, while the private option is an additional way to add guarantees when you're running databases at scale.

Beyond providing better connectivity between clouds with AWS Direct Connect, you may have also seen that we've recently started offering ObjectRocket Redis hosted directly out of AWS. If that sounds interesting or you just want to chat about some Elasticsearch, MongoDB, Redis, or anything else in the database world, hit us up.